5 Sublime Text Plug-ins for Frontend Development

Every developer knows that workflow automation is extremely important to web development. Luckily there are tons of programs built around this concept of automating workflow.

In this article I’m going to talk about several plug-ins that have been created for Sublime Text 2, which is one of the most popular text-editors available. I want to quickly note that any plug-ins running on Sublime 2 should install perfectly in Sublime 3+. So without further ado, let’s take a look at some of these plug-ins and see how they can improve your efficiency when programming.

Emmet is an extremely helpful toolkit for frontend developers. It allows you to quickly generate snippets of code.

For example, the code ul>li*4>a would generate an unordered list containing 4 anchored list items. The Emmet toolkit also provides the ability to move around throughout code seamlessly using keyboard shortcuts.

When working on a big project, files can become cluttered with non-semantic code very quickly. In turn, these files become harder to maintain as this clutter makes it harder to find errors.

With the help of HTMLPrettify your code will automatically be formatted(or beautified) so that you can navigate easily. Although its name suggests otherwise, HTMLPrettify is not limited to HTML files. It can be used to “prettify” JavaScript, CSS, and JSON files as well.

Colorpicker is a plug-in built for generating hex values for your css files. Having to constantly look up different hex codes can be a pain, so ColorPicker provides you with a color wheel where you can choose a color.

Next is the AllAutocomplete plug-in. Sublime Text automatically looks throughout individual files for repeated words; AllAutocomplete takes it one step further and searches through every file of your project so you don’t have to write out the same words over and over again.

It can be a pain to manually write all of the tags necessary to get started with an index.html file – however they are the basis of all web apps.

In an attempt to automate this process the HTML5Boilerplate plug-in was created. It generates an HTML5 template with all the tags necessary to get up and running. All you have to do is create an html file, type htmlboiler, hit tab & your barebones HTML5 boilerplate file will appear.

And there you have it! My list of Sublime Text 2 Plug-ins.

Although these will undoubtedly help your performance, definitely check out what other Sublime plug-ins have to offer. You surely will not be disappointed.

Thomas Greco is a web developer based out of New York City specializing in full-stack development with the M.E.A.N. stack technologies. Before web development Thomas worked as a graphic designer, and he continues to utilize his background in design when building web applications. Have a question for Thomas? You can reach him at [email protected] or on social media via Twitter.

1 comment

Krik Batner / September 1, 2015

Having HTML5 Boilerplate along side Emmet is a little redundant.

Using Emmet you should be able to type `html:5` and hit `tab` and you get a simpler version of the same thing.